A single-payer clinic for hotel workers to open in Brooklyn

The clinic will take up five floors of the 160,000-square-foot, 12-story mixed-use building.

An innovative Brooklyn health center scheduled to open Aug. 7 has no waiting rooms, and it offers patients the opportunity to see a primary care doctor and a specialist during the same visit.

The Brooklyn Health Center, at 620 Fulton St. in Fort Greene, is the fifth clinic in a network operated by the New York Hotel Trades Council and the Hotel Association of New York City. The clinics exclusively serve current and retired hotel workers and their spouses and dependents, providing medical, surgical, dental and optical care.

The new center will take up five floors of the 12-story, 160,000-square-foot mixed-use building, which will include ground-floor retail and office space. The Hotel Association spent $150 million on the project, including equipment and supplies, Dr. Robert Greenspan, chief executive of the union's Employee Benefit Funds, said over the din of drilling during a hard-hat tour of the site.

"My members work at the most expensive hotels in the world," Greenspan said. "They're professionally trained in customer service. I can't have them come to a place to get health care that treats them worse than they treat guests at a hotel."

Management contributes 26.5% of gross wages toward benefits and spends about $450 million annually on nearly 90,000 covered participants. Medical visits to the network's clinics are covered without a copay, but members who live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx must use those health centers or cover their own medical expenses. Prescriptions must also be filled at the centers' pharmacies.

In eliminating waiting rooms, the Brooklyn clinic is counting on its staff to move patients through the office quickly.

Greenspan said he expects 85% of patients to complete their visit, including pharmacy pickup, within an hour.

Patient rooms are organized into several corridors on each floor, with patients entering on one side and medical staff walking through a door on the opposite side of the room. In the middle of each corridor is an area where all staff—doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, clerical staff—can congregate. Physicians don't have private offices in an effort to foster a team-based approach to care. The staff area and a separate lounge include large monitors with color-coding that show whether a room has been left empty for too long.

The health center hopes to generate some of its efficiency from the way it is organized. Exam rooms on each floor are grouped into pods around certain specialties, such as musculoskeletal disorders, cardiology and endocrinology.

"If you're a diabetic patient and you see your primary care physician, and he notices you haven't had your podiatric foot exam or you haven't seen your optometrist for a retinal exam, you don't need three separate appointments over two months to get all that done," Greenspan said.

That flexibility stems from the self-funded nature of the network's clinics, which don't have to adhere to billing restrictions related to doctors performing an exam and a procedure on the same day.

"Most ambulatory centers don't set it up that way. They set it up by practice. Those tend not to be very well integrated," said Catherine Gow, principal of health facilities planning at Francis Cauffman, the architecture firm that designed the building.

Vijay Dandapani, president of the city Hotel Association, said the project is a way to support the well-being of the industry's workers.

"While the political wars rage in Washington, D.C., over the future of health care, here in New York City, labor and management in the hotel industry are coming together and creating innovative solutions for tens of thousands of our employees," Dandapani said in a statement.

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